Schadrach

Used to have an office that was an addition to the building, with no room to connect it to the main HVAC. I had one of these to myself. The window on my office door fogged up frequently because I set the thing to give-visitors-frostbite-cold.

Yeah, the thing a lot of people seem to miss is just how major of a geographic barrier the Sahara is. As a consequence, northern Africans weren’t generally very black for most of history.

hey want to drag the nation back about a century. Women without a vote, black people again as slaves,

Neither of those was the case a century ago. Literally closer to two centuries than one for black folks since slavery (160 years since the 13th Amendment to be more exact) and women’s suffrage is also over a century old if you count it starting at the 19th Amendment as opposed to any period where it was up to the states.

Yeah, but despite being diabetic I can’t live without apple butter. To be fair that’s why I get the “no granulated sugar added” stuff from Amish country. Depending on the brand, no more than four ingredients (apples, apple cider, lemon juice, spices), though my preferred brand only has three (no lemon juice). Way better quality than most other kinds too - you get more of the tartness of the apples because the only sweetener is more apple and they use less of the apple cider to sweeten than they otherwise might because you can only take it so far before it messes with the texture or flavor too much (which isn’t as much a problem for most other sweeteners) and it costs more.

Amish Wedding, Jake & Amos and Yoder’s all have good ones. The jar I finished off with my breakfast this morning was 5g carb/tablespoon, which is pretty low for apple butter.

Same idea for jams and jellies - particularly fond of Mrs. Miller’s no granulated sugar added jams, which get sweetened with fruit juice (which in turn has price/flavor/texture limits on how much you can use and still have a good product). Whereas actual sugar free jams by the major brands tend to be godawful with entirely the wrong texture and flavor - Smucker’s sugar free jams are an insult to the fruit they were at some point walked past during their production.

Related is that things that use unusual or expensive sugar sources (think agave nectar or honey as the primary or only sweetener as opposed to cane sugar, HFCS or something like that) tend to use less for price reasons and so tend to be slightly less horrific on the added sugar front.

So yeah … that’s the story of how my supposedly healthy friend gave himself diabetes by drinking a metric fuckton of OJ.

Worth noting that drinking all that OJ also essentially means his blood sugar could not be properly measured by some of the testing methods used, because high levels of vitamin C interfere. I wear a CGM and it warns me every time I put on a new sensor not to consume more than 500mg of vitamin C per day if I want it to work, which is much less than a gallon of OJ. Same applies to most common glucometers. Unless they checked his blood sugar using a lab test that didn’t involve a redox reaction, it’s good odds that his blood sugar was not actually whatever it tested as. They likely had to make him swear off the OJ for a day or so and then rerun it to get a real number.

For reference, type I, was at 421 when diagnosed back in the 90s, blood sugar has never been higher than that though I did have one serious hypoglycemic incident where it managed to get low enough that it wasn’t measurable, after they started a glucose IV I came to when it got up to about 35. Closest I’ve ever been to dying.

I have about 2 hours of lost time from that incident, during which I drove a total of about 20 miles between at least two trips. No coherent memory of that period, just a few flashes - I remember the steering wheel in my hands and the pressure of the pedal against my foot, I remember the Sheriff’s Department logo sideways, I remember someone in medium blue, like a work uniform or maybe scrubs or something similar said something to me and I said something back (I don’t remember what either of us said) and then it was two hours after my last coherent memories and I’m in the back of an ambulance with a glucose IV in one arm, an EMT on that side pricking my finger to check my blood sugar and it coming up 35, and EMT on the other side squeezing a tube of glucose paste into my mouth that tasted like a tin can in all the worst ways. The EMT noticed me looking at him and started asking general awareness questions, seemed a bit worried that my answer to where I was was “in the back of a parked ambulance, but I’m not sure where the ambulance is.” Car was totaled, thankfully no one was hurt. I think whatever part of me was still capable of decision making was trying to get help, since I wrecked very close to a hospital ER that would require me to drive out of my usual way to get to.

Chris-chan is a person who got targeted literal decades ago and has been persistently doxed and harassed ever since. The constant dozing, harassment and scrutiny has really messed them up, overall and they weren’t in a great mental place to start with.

Just imagine the single most elaborate doxing and cyber bullying campaign ever devised, enacted over years going back to at least 2009 and ongoing to this day. Every detail of the poor person documented because they became kind of an obsession for some folks.

The notorious KiwiFarms dozing and harassment forum was literally born from Chris-chans stalkers expanding their target roster.

It’s an internet forum that picks targets they think it would be funny to harass (dubbed “lolcows”) and then doxes, tracks and harasses them.

It started life as people following, doxing and harassing Chris-chan (as a consequence Chris-chan is probably the single most documented human in history because of internet weirdos). Chris-chan did eventually come out as trans, but that didn’t happen until they’d already been obsessively watching them for over a decade so they clearly didn’t start targeting them because of trans status.

It usually gets painted as being a primarily anti-trans site, but they don’t limit themselves to trans people, though they do have a board for trans targets. They have an entire board dedicated to furries, another dedicated fat activists, etc. If you’re internet-famous and kinda weird or controversial, they’ve probably started a thread to at least start obsessively gooning over you if not worse than that. Their thread on Musk has the blurb “Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter owner + ex-paypal CEO. Manchild, sexual deviant, spergy autist with access to space travel .”

The site most recently made news headlines when CloudFlare decided to cut them off, being the first time that CF has ever behaved in the fashion of a content moderator. This took them down for a couple of days until they found an alternate anti-DDOS solution.

For clarity, I am going to use man/woman in reference to gender and male/female in reference to sex.

Always said this is exactly the way to protest those laws. Get the burliest, most masculine trans men you can find and engage in malicious compliance.

The conservatives and the TERFs are totally aligned on this one - and their thinking boils down to a few points:

1. You cannot change your sex.
2. Male persons are evil, dangerous predators.
3. Predators will do whatever they need to to get better access to prey.
4. Sex-segregated spaces are segregated by sex, not gender and exist in order to protect female persons from predators by limiting access to them by male persons while in a vulnerable position.

…and that’s really it. You might notice that trans men are totally irrelevant to all of that, since they only really care about women’s spaces. To them a trans man using the men’s room is only putting themself at risk and doing so by their own choice, while a trans woman is endangering the cis women in the space against their will by existing.

I may be wrong, but I was thinking the Machinarium with 8 gear rooms was the solution to something, and was being vague about it. So Workshop, Security, Utility Closet, Laboratory, Pump Room, Boiler Room, Hall of Mirrors to duplicate one of the above then Machinarium.

As for the drafting studio, that might be a solution. I’ve had bad luck getting it to pull too, only having seen it twice. Been holding off on picking an outer room in recent runs so that if I see the drafting studio again I can burn rerolls to force a shrine to get maximum use out of it.

As for a trophy for drafting 9 of one room, I hope that room is either aquarium or tunnel. I can’t think of another room it might be reasonable to draft that many of in one run.

Shit even my in laws say they are centrist, they don’t hold a single view that’s centrist. They vote down ticket republican their whole lives. This is a thing republicans do.

I voted a mixed ticket until 2016. Then straight blue until 2024, and only one exception in 2024 and she was was a city seat that I knew and could knock on her door and yell at in person if she did something I didn’t like.

Or to pick more immediately pertinent examples, RFK is a an idiot, but he supports banning some food additives that are already banned elsewhere for good reasons, Trump is an idiot, but he wants to end daylight savings time. Both are good ideas, despite support from terrible people and being supported by those terrible people doesn’t make them suddenly terrible ideas.

That’s what they said. You get given a choice between “drag things farther to the right” and “do nothing”, with a system designed to always collapse into two functional parties, knowing you’re too terrified of “drag things farther to the right” to meaningfully challenge “do nothing.”

It’s like a political ratchet.

It’s just the End of Days… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RKRO_VssJQ

Hey, you figured out a way to get MAGA types to support abortion - just find a way for tech bros to monetize aborted fetuses for shiny tech thing. Starte= referring to them as “extruded excess biomass” or something.

You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.

It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

This was not personal interest, though it is an incredibly interesting text. It was fascinating to discover he devoted ~2.5 chapters to the importance of the same kind of simple, yet powerful finger-pointing rhetoric used by right-wing ideologists to this day. I joking say it’s one of the earliest texts on meme theory, and it’s only half a joke.

I still find it funny that just a few years ago a feminist social work journal called Affilia published an article that was essentially a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf in terms of sex and with some “fashionable buzzwords” included under the title “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” Especially since the bit is spelled out right in the title (for anyone who doesn’t know, “Mein Kampf” literally translates as “My Struggle”). It was part of the grievance studies affair.

I think I have a mutation in a taste bud or something, but Sucralose is really a prominent and nasty taste to me in anything it’s in.

The only artificial sweetener I get a nasty aftertaste from is saccharine. But I get a really absurdly foul aftertaste from saccharine, I can’t even compare it to anything because it’s easily the worst thing I have ever tasted in my life and I can’t think of anything even sort of similar. Glad basically nothing uses it any more, but it was more of an issue as a type I diabetic kid decades ago. Sucralose doesn’t give me an aftertaste at all though, neither does aspartame or acesulfame potassium.

My preferred sweetener though is stevia (I used to go to the local new age shop and buy just dried stevia leaves for my tea and such during the time it was legal to sell in any amount for any purpose as an herbal supplement so long as you didn’t mention it had a flavor which turned it into an unsafe food additive because fuck NutraSweet corp). It took such a ridiculous time to get approved because of NutraSweet, when stevia really should have fallen under GRAS status for the same reason things like tomatoes did - New World plant used in food forever by the natives, but wholly new to Europeans when they came to the Americas.

You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!

We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.

Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user’s shares.